OUR GANG

by Rick Borchelt

Rick Borchelt

Randy Atkins switches gears from theory to application with a move from the American Institute of Physics media office to the newly created position of senior public relations officer at the National Academy of Engineering. Randy's been at the APS for two years; before that he was at the American Chemical Society. Reach him at his new e-mail, ratkins@nae.edu.

The Mayo Clinic's ace Web creator and writer, Gary Schwitzer, will be helping train a new generation of health journalists at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Gary tells us he'll be part of a new graduate program in health journalism set to debut in Fall 2002. Meantime, he'll continue to consult on the award-winning Mayo consumer health site, MayoClinic.com, and explore other freelance writing and multimedia production opportunities. Gary's new e-mail is schwitz@unm.edu.

An academic post is in the offing for freelance Stephen Hart, too, who is professional-in-residence for science writing in the University of Arizona's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology for the fall semester. He's teaching mostly undergrad students in biology and journalism.

And I thought I'd been job-hopping! The ink was barely dry on the Our Gang item about Cathy Yarbrough's move from the National Human Genome Research Institute to Novartis when up pops another message from Cathy, this time her new e-mail (yarbroc@mail.rockefeller.edu) and new post-she's the vice president of communications and public affairs at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Nigel Hey's new book, Mapping the Solar System, is due out next year, and Nigel enjoyed the writing experience so much he's decided to retire his 9-5 job at Sandia National Laboratories to become a full-time writer. He has another book completed and is discussing a third concept with editors, so his "retirement" looks pretty busy. Reach him through his NASW e-mail address, nigel@nasw.org.

Our favorite Scotsman in Washington, Colin Macilwain, keeps moving up in the Nature chain of command. He's now the news editor at Nature. Previously, this position has always been located in London, but Colin notes that the Internet and other new communications technologies make it possible to do the job from such a tropical hardship duty post as D.C.

Change is in the air at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University. David Jarmul leaves HHMI in Bethesda, Md., to become Duke's new associate vice president for news and communications. He replaces Al Rossiter as head of the news office there.

Joanna Downer has left the Duke University Medical Center News Office after 2-1/2 years to cover basic biomedical research for the media group of Johns Hopkins Medicine Public Affairs. She'd been commuting up from northern Virginia every day and looking forward to snagging a Baltimore apartment. Her new contact info is jdowner1@jhmi.edu.

Cori Vanchieri, meanwhile, has made the big shift from freelance to full-time gig as editor of the HHMI Bulletin, where you can reach her at vanchieric@hhmi.org.

Freelance Cheryl Platzman Weinstock stays a freelance, but gets a new view. She's moved from Chappaqua, N.Y.; look for her these days in Westport, Conn.

#

Rick Borchelt is director of communications for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Send hot NASW-related gossip to Rick at rborchelt@nasw.org, or phone him at 202-586-6702.